"Better cable, better image"

[Flint]

I will always encourage people to use an appropriately sufficient cable to get the job done without issues, but that is a very small step compared to upgrading to a $500 10 foot HDMI cable from Monster Cables (which is what the advertisement was pushing).

With 4K being new, I am certain there are plenty of cables out there in the world which will struggle to get the job done sufficiently. And surely many of us may need to upgrade our trusty HDMI cables when we finally move to a 4K UHD TV over the next few years. But I would argue that it would likely never occur that a costly cable sold at a massive premium from Best Buy would make a huge difference (or any difference) in the picture quality over a well designed and built cable from a trustworthy source, like Blue Jeans Cables.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

When I was designing large 84" touch monitors for TouchShare (before they went out of business), I found that with 4K especially, poor quality HDMI cables produced visible noise and "speckles" in the video. Good cables which were not outrageously expensive did not have these issues. None of this was magic, but it does show that good quality cables for video were warranted. We never used the hyper expensive stuff though.

It might be a moot point, but my assumption is that this is not a "cable" issue but rather a difference in "connector" quality.

Not the same, but perhaps an illustrative example, I've had the occasional problem with USB cable connections with my office computer. I connect a ton of hubs and devices etc and occasionally I'll get a device, or chain of devices, drop off or misbehave. If I wiggle the connectors attached to the computer things start working again. So it was likely not a problem with ones and zeroes flowing through cable, but them intermittently failing at the connector - and this could be with either the PC or the cable's connector.

And I realize that cheap cable can usually mean cheap connector. My point is that, over any reasonable distance it's hard to imagine the cable interfering with the signal.

Just my guess.

Jeff

Actually, it has mostly to do with the cable itself; particularly the shielding, and the characteristic impedance being wrong which is a huge deal at the frequencies involved with 4k video (if there is a big enough mismatch there can be destructive reflections of the signal, no matter the length of the cable). This is getting into transmission line stuff which can get really complicated very fast at very high frequencies. Of course the cable can have a crappy connector too, but this is more likely to cause the signal to drop out or have large glitches verses noise and video artifacts. For the cost, Monoprice cables were the best combination of lack of noise/artifacts and price. As long as the signal gets to the destination with no degradation, then there is no point in improving the cable beyond that.

We didn't get into the weeds with monitoring the signal on a signal analyzer, though we could have done that. There were more pressing issues with time, namely getting a damn prototype out for the trade shows. By the way, this was in 2013 - two years before Microsoft came up with the Surface Hub, which they STILL haven't delivered to customers. We were already there, and had already done that.